Posted on 07/29/2007 4:49:21 AM PDT by GiovannaNicoletta
Socialized medicine doesn't work, and state experiments toward that end are proving it.
One beauty of America's federalist system of government is that individual states can famously serve as "laboratories of democracy." Thus, state governments can experiment with different approaches to address the needs of their respective citizens, allowing us to determine which approaches work, and which ones don't.
Indeed, such state experimentation has proven invaluable in maintaining this vital federalist system. Perhaps the best example in recent memory is the state of Wisconsin's successful implementation of welfare reform in the 1990s. Based upon Wisconsin's wildly successful model, the former President Bill Clinton was finally forced to succumb to the Newt Gingrich-led effort to enact similar welfare reform nationwide. The results speak for themselves, as welfare rolls have plummeted while employment and productive behavior among former welfare recipients have skyrocketed.
This was our federalist system at its best. And we at the Center for Individual Freedom, as a group dedicated to preserving and advancing the principles enshrined in our Constitution, applaud this flexibility of experimentation, and stand as a vanguard against centralized bureaucratic encroachment upon such freedom.
Unfortunately, the right of states to engage in policy experimentation sometimes teaches lessons on what not to do.
Efforts toward socialized medicine are a case in point. Certain states have recently begun to implement socialized health care initiatives, with already disastrous results.
Ironically, one vivid example comes from Wisconsin, which provided such positive instruction regarding welfare reform. The Wisconsin Senate has passed a "single-payer" plan to provide coverage for every resident over age 65, but the price tag and necessary tax increases render it a cancerous proposal for Wisconsin citizens and taxpayers. It turns out that the scheme will cost each Wisconsin worker an average of $510 every month, and businesses would suffer a new 14.5% tax on wages paid, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In addition to the stifling costs and tax increases, which will merely drive businesses, employees and productive citizens to relocate in other states, this plan will provide a perverse incentive for illegal immigrants, the uninsured and less-healthy people to relocate to Wisconsin. This is because the program is open to anyone who has lived in Wisconsin for 12 months, regardless of employment status.
In other words, an already poisonous government program will only get worse through a vicious cycle as businesses and healthy citizens leave, while freeloaders and unhealthy citizens replace them. Additionally, big labor unions salivate at the prospect of unloading their health care responsibilities upon hapless Wisconsin taxpayers.
Massachusetts, which famously introduced its own effort toward mandatory universal coverage, provides another unfortunate example of the failure of government-paid health care.
Last year, Massachusetts passed a prematurely-celebrated health care initiative entitled "Commonwealth Care" that provided state-subsidized coverage and required all residents to purchase insurance. State residents who fail to obtain insurance are penalized with additional state taxes. The law also required employers to either pay for health insurance or cough up a hefty tax penalty for each employee that they cannot cover.
Anyone who has passed Econ 101 could have predicted what would happen next, but it nevertheless caught government bureaucrats by surprise.
Across the state, primary care providers are now turning away patients, and waiting times have lengthened because physicians receive below-market payments along with an influx of new patients. Thus, Massachusetts bureaucrats are learning a lesson that even Communist bloc countries learned decades ago: when government social planners artificially increase demand and reduce supply via price controls and rationing, shortages and inferior quality quickly follow.
And this is an idea that so many wish to emulate in other states and on a national scale?
After all, there is a reason that Canadians come to America for health care coverage, rather than vice-versa, regardless of Michael Moore's "Sicko" propaganda. Namely, the free market works, and socialized medicine does not.
Defenders of socialized medicine often respond that the nation's V.A. system proves that government-provided health insurance can work. What these activists fail to acknowledge, however, is that the V.A. system is not a form of health "insurance." Rather, it is a social safety net provided by taxpayers to veterans in recognition of the great contribution that veterans have made to our nation. It is a benefit that they have earned, not a society-wide system of health insurance. Accordingly, this well-deserved reward to our nation's veterans does not provide a parallel to socialized medicine.
Across the country, state politicians and presidential candidates seek to spread these failed schemes in pursuit of cheap political points. It is incumbent upon more sober Americans to stop them.
Here's one. When toilet paper is rationed...you have achieved Communism.
It's a column, not a book.
If the payments were not held artificially low (below market), the influx of new patients would create a shortage, which would bid up prices, which would result in a increase in services as doctors relocate to Massachusetts to reap the windfall.
By holding prices low, there is no reason for any doctor to move to Massachusetts. In fact, there is a perverse insentive to relocate from the state, thus reducing supply and creating even more of a backlog.
That is why analysis of the debacles of socialized care, where they exist in the United States, is so important. People can see with their own eyes, by looking at Wisconsin or Massachusetts, what these policies will bring.
For some reason, folks look at the Canadian or UK system and think that we can avoid those problems. But when Wisconsin can't make it work, it is harder to write that off.
Perhaps the result of the “Laboratories of Democracy” is that we evolve even more into a nation of welfare states and free market states. Some states will be wealth producers and some will be wealth sinks. The trick will be to prevent the transfer of money from wealth producing states to wealth consuming states, so the people of those states must bear the burden of their popularly approved system.
So, if Wisconsin wishes to attract all of the non-productive and high-cost citizens in the country and tax itself as required in order to support them, there is no good reason that they should not be allowed to do so. We just must be very careful to make sure the US Treasury does not wind up paying for programs approved by the Wisconsin Legislature.
Similarly, of Wisconsin wishes to drive out all productive members of their society through confiscatory taxes, there are 49 other states who will be more than happy to have them. What’s wrong with that. People should be permitted to shop for the government they want.
You are both correct in saying that below-market payments give doctors less of a reason to offer their services. As a result, when doctors offer fewer services, regardless of the influx of new patients, then the longer waiting times take place.
I’m just picking on the author for leaving out this crucial step in his argument.
And because of your input, I must revise my argument that it is only the influx of new patients that result in longer waiting times. When doctors offer fewer services, this also contributes to longer waiting times.
Short on hard statistics.
Here’s one. When toilet paper is rationed...you have achieved Communism.
or you have subscirbed to the sheryl crow world philosophy...
which is the same as communism!!!
Friend of mine lives in the UK. The way the system works there, he says, is that when you make an appointment for say 10:00 AM you arrive to find a roomful of patients with the same appointment time. So you get treated maybe 2-3 hours later. Everyone who can afford it has another private plan which allows regular scheduling like we have. Some of the same doctors do both.
I guess that’s why plans proposed here won’t allow dual systems like this.
They can’t believe such bad things could possibly happen from such a “good idea” as universal health care.
Yup. HillaryCare---just like Hillary herself---is unable to tolerate competition.
The author misses the point. Hillary KNOWS EVERYTHING! She will ignore any evidence to the contrary and proceed to destroy the US medical community. And she will claim a victory for the People.
Look for the return of BIG FEDERAL GOVERNMENT and the shrinking of STATE and LOCAL governments in terms of authority.
Even Jum Bunning, a Republican, tried to close down the State Retirement Systems and put everyone in Social Security. Thanks Jim, you drunken RINO.
HillaryCare — All the compassion of the IRS, combined with the efficiency of the DMV.
Massachusetts, which famously introduced its own effort toward mandatory universal coverage, provides another unfortunate example of the failure of government-paid health care.Last year, Massachusetts passed a prematurely-celebrated health care initiative entitled "Commonwealth Care" that provided state-subsidized coverage and required all residents to purchase insurance. State residents who fail to obtain insurance are penalized with additional state taxes. The law also required employers to either pay for health insurance or cough up a hefty tax penalty for each employee that they cannot cover.
Anyone who has passed Econ 101 could have predicted what would happen next, but it nevertheless caught government bureaucrats by surprise.
Across the state, primary care providers are now turning away patients, and waiting times have lengthened because physicians receive below-market payments along with an influx of new patients. Thus, Massachusetts bureaucrats are learning a lesson that even Communist bloc countries learned decades ago: when government social planners artificially increase demand and reduce supply via price controls and rationing, shortages and inferior quality quickly follow.
This is Mitt Romney's baby
Well, we see how well Tenn Care and other state funded and mandated healthcare programs work.
Or don’t work.
Don’t get me started on TennCare. That is one program I wish TN would dump. It eats so much of the budget that a few years back, the Leftys tried to get a state income tax started to feed this monster. Thank God that was averted. Side note, I think most of those legislators that supported it are now gone.
Supporters of Utopian government (the idolatrous concept that government can bring humanity good that humanity could not otherwise achieve on its own) follow the same play book: seize a universal human activity that most people do well enough, but some people do not. We had this with public education, retirement pensions (social “security”) and now with health care.
Claim that for the sake of those who cannot perform it, government must. Propose a government program that seems, on its face, to be adequate, and propose taxes to pay for it. These taxes will consume all the funds that lower and middle-income families spend on this function, thus making government their only way to get the function accomplished. The wealthy, of course, are given a way out.
But this is a Big Lie and part of the Culture of Lies. Government cannot perform an economic function as well as private business can. Even when it does, it cannot do it for long, or without exempting itself from economic reality.
The Culture of Lies is how well government does. How much, in total, are we spending for public education, compared to how much it would cost if we could send our children to any of the tens of thousands of private schools that we would have? We spend a staggering amount of tax money to educate a single child to the point of graduation from High School, in the extreme case such as Washington DC, it costs almost $1.5 million to graduate a single youth who is competent at their grade level in math.
The Culture of Lies is extended in how well Social Security performs. Happily, we have some legislative mistakes that allowed one county in Texas to set up its own replacement for Social Security. Their retirees enjoy payments that are some three times that of the federal program. Congress won’t make that mistake again. The Texas example, extended nationwide, documents how many trillions of dollars are just destroyed by how the system is designed.
There is no way that socialized medical care will cost less or deliver better service that the mess we presently have. If it does, it will be for very selected and accidental backwaters or eddies in the main current of wealth destruction, not to mention destruction of choice and liberty.
A Culture of Lies By Fjordman
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2267/print
>>
A Culture of Lies
By Fjordman
Created 2007-07-26 19:09
The always excellent writer Theodore Dalrymple, one of the most astute observers of Britain and indeed of the Western world today, has assessed the ten years under the leadership of former PM Tony Blair. According to Dalrymple, “Many in Britain believe that he has been the worst prime minister in recent British history, morally and possibly financially corrupt, shallow and egotistical.” One of the reasons for this negative view is the rapid growth of insecurity, ironically combined with the even more rapid growth of surveillance: “The typical Briton finds himself recorded by security cameras 300 times a day does not secure him in the slightest from crime or antisocial behavior, which remain prevalent in Britain, so no one feels any safer from the terrorist threat despite the ever-increasing government surveillance.”
British citizens pay obscenely large amounts of taxes, but get less and less in return for this, except an increasingly hostile state: “The National Health Service, where bureaucracies have hugely expanded and entwined their interests so closely with those of private suppliers and consultancies that it is difficult to distinguish public from private any longer. Spending on the NHS has increased by two and a half times in the space of 10 years; yet it is hard to see any corresponding improvement in the service, other than in the standard of living of those who work in it.”
He believes the inadequacies of the state are hidden beneath a web of lies of half-truths, and by confusing the public through corrupting official statistics. Unemployment rates are artificially kept down by classifying people as sick rather than unemployed, “and thus, by a single lie, is the population, the medical profession and the government corrupted.” Likewise, crime rates are kept down by encouraging the police not to record crimes. Through such measures, “the whole of society finds itself corrupted and infantilized by its inability to talk straight.”
Dalrymple states that “We have come to expect dishonesty – of which this little lie was an example – at every level of society. The dishonesty is intellectual, moral and financial, and its root is self-interest conceived in the narrowest possible way. In modern Britain, probity is foolishness or, worse still, naivety.” He believes this corrupts the entire fabric of society: “When dignity requires illegality, there is something rotten in the state.”
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The article is excellent, but it fails to deal effectively with the mindset of the Left.
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There is no “dealing” with the mindset of the Left. This is a matter of power and votes. The battle is for the voter in the middle, the few percent who could be swayed either way.
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